FaltyDL: Endeavour EP

As FaltyDL’s last EP for Planet Mu, Phreqaflex saw him appropriate 2step garage, the three tracks on Endeavour see him turn his attentions to classic house music. And as with Phreqaflex, once you get away from the tempo and structure it’s a distant shadow of the genre it apes;a totally unique tribute to house that often sounds closer to otherworldly jazz than it does anything fashioned on a computer.

The silk-smooth groove of the EP’s title track makes for some utterly galactic longue house; a slow rhythm skittering and bouncing forward while cavernous, reverberating keys echo from the door of some back alley space-jazz club. As the track draws to a close with a blasting trill of saxophone the jazz influences become even more clear, and Falty indulges this side of himself again in ‘Filthy Divinity’ – syncopated snare licks bolstering a funky, muted bassline. There’s even touches of fellow LCD Soundsystem in the underlying excitement of ‘Divinity’’s almost live drums and floor-focused bassline; Falty drawing from different eras of New York and matching them up in the context of his own sound.

The entire EP seems to breathe New York’s streets – ‘Odyssey’ churns up looping strings that could have been cut from a crescendo in Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver score, while both ‘Endeavour’ and ‘Divinity’ end with jazz samples lost among the rhythms and smoke of the city. Overall, it paints a cross-section of the Big Apple, from the underground, through the surface and up to the overbearing skyscrapers above, and although they’re not obviously built for dancefloors, the enthusiasm and ingenuity hard-wired into these tracks deserves a reaction anywhere and everywhere.